Carlos Alberto Montaner fades away

By: César Vidal - 21/05/2023

There is an old English soldier's song whose lyrics say: “Old soldiers never die,

Never die, never die, Old soldiers never die, They simply fade away”, which could be translated as “Old soldiers never die, never die, they simply fade away”. The ditty is a parody of an evangelical song titled Kind Thoughts Can Never Die and the fact that it was sung in military settings explains that it was used at a certain time by General Douglas MacArthur. On April 19, 1951, after a clear confrontation with the presidential power of Harry Truman, MacArthur – who had accepted the capitulation of Japan in the battleship Missouri at the end of the Second World War – announced before the United States Congress his withdrawal. of military life. MacArthur's speech is known as the "old soldiers never die" speech, but in reality, the military veteran reproduced – and thus recognized – the lyrics of the English theme stating: “I remember the chorus of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day that proudly proclaimed that “old soldiers never die; just fade away." And like the old soldier in that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to fulfill his duty just as God gave him light to see that duty ”.

I had known for a long time that Carlos Alberto Montaner was sick and I insistently wondered how a disease would evolve that, by its very nature, gradually dismantles the capacities of any human being piece by piece. I have the feeling that the last time I saw him was before the coronavirus crisis at a public event, but meeting such an eventuality became very difficult since a good part of my life is spent in Washington in the vicinity of what some They call it “the swamp”. But still... Whenever I met a common acquaintance, I was interested in his state of health and the news was always discouraging. When, just a few days ago, I came across his farewell, I had to admit that the inevitable had arrived. Carlos Alberto did not die – old soldiers never die – but,

I think the first time I heard of his existence was when I was a teenager – he certainly hadn't turned twenty – when I read his book dedicated to x-raying the Cuban revolution. For me, that work was a real surprise because it was not a hagiographic hymn of Fidel Castro, like so many published in Spain at the time, but neither was it the black story of something that was an example of absolute evil. Montaner defended freedom and democracy, but, at the same time, recognized that Castro had improved the lot of a sector of Cuban society. The great drama was that in order to improve the condition of that social segment, he had dragged the rest of the country into a dictatorship, into mass exile and misery.

Over the decades that followed, I came across his writings here and there, and learned of his escape from a Cuban jail in terms that would have seemed totally implausible to me if I had read them in a novel. However, it was already at the end of the 1990s when I met him in person at the liberal meetings that, at that time, were held in the beautiful Spanish town of Albarracín, in the middle of Aragón. I think that those events stopped taking place many years ago, but at that time they allowed me to meet people like Mario Vargas Llosa – still without a Nobel Prize, although everyone was convinced that if they didn't get it that year they would give it to the next – and Montaner himself.

The authors of the books we read do not always correspond to the portrait we have formed of them, but that Montaner did correspond to the one I had deduced from his X-ray of the Cuban revolution. He was a liberal – not in the American but in the European sense – moderate in his appreciation and clear in expression. Chatting with him was always a pleasant experience, one of those that is occasionally taken out of the drawer of memories to enjoy again. It was on the occasion of those liberal meetings where I had the opportunity, for example, to hear from his own mouth the impact that a heart attack had caused him precisely when we were returning in the same car from Albarracín to Madrid and when I raised a prayer to the Most High so that he would not I would take him out of this world as soon as possible.

At that time I resumed my trips to Miami that had been interrupted for a while and I met him again on this side of the world at events of a political nature thanks especially to a university professor named Ricardo Lago. It was like this, for example, that one night I listened to a conference by Montaner on what the transition in Cuba should be, at the end of which Lago whispered to me: "he has spoken like the first democratic president of Cuba." I would have wanted that at that time because at that time – up a year ago, down a year, a quarter of a century – Montaner was at an age and a time when he could have undertaken that task. In fact, he supported positions that sought dialogue with the regime to get out of the impasse into which he had plunged Cuba and which caused him not a few criticisms. But time, I know for myself,

Not only is it that the passing of the years moved Montaner away from that destiny of leading a transition, but also that our world began to experience mutations that I have collected in my book A world that changes and that displaced reality in a very different direction from the one we could think of in the nineties. We expected a very different future when the USSR collapsed in 1991, and certainly the world has been different, but not what we expected. Not only is the dictatorship not collapsed in Cuba, but also the paradigms of the cold war in which Montaner moved like a fish in water have disappeared. I know that many continue to analyze what happens in the world according to this pattern, but, precisely, That is one of the reasons why they are not correct in their forecasts and why their analyzes do not correspond to reality. After all, in the same way that Bismarck would never have made the mistake of conceiving his world as if it were Napoleon's and that Roosevelt did not follow the patterns of Lincoln's time, now pretending to see our political universe through the lenses of the cold war is an anachronism of considerable gravity. Neither the right nor the left of that time are the current ones and in international politics, the real confrontation takes place not between them but between the politicians who follow a patriotic line and those who try to impose the globalist agenda. But let's not deviate. In the same way that Bismarck would never have made the mistake of conceiving his world as if it were Napoleon's and that Roosevelt did not follow the patterns of Lincoln's time, pretending to see our political universe now through the lenses of the Cold War is a mistake. anachronism of considerable gravity. Neither the right nor the left of that time are the current ones and in international politics, the real confrontation takes place not between them but between the politicians who follow a patriotic line and those who try to impose the globalist agenda. But let's not deviate. In the same way that Bismarck would never have made the mistake of conceiving his world as if it were Napoleon's and that Roosevelt did not follow the patterns of Lincoln's time, pretending to see our political universe now through the lenses of the Cold War is a mistake. anachronism of considerable gravity. Neither the right nor the left of that time are the current ones and in international politics, the real confrontation takes place not between them but between the politicians who follow a patriotic line and those who try to impose the globalist agenda. But let's not deviate. Neither the right nor the left of that time are the current ones and in international politics, the real confrontation takes place not between them but between the politicians who follow a patriotic line and those who try to impose the globalist agenda. But let's not deviate. Neither the right nor the left of that time are the current ones and in international politics, the real confrontation takes place not between them but between the politicians who follow a patriotic line and those who try to impose the globalist agenda. But let's not deviate.

Old soldiers never die because in the memory of those who knew them – and those who received the benefits of their courage and tenacity – that eventuality is not possible. Only one day, which is always greeted with emotion, do they vanish even before physically leaving this world. It happened with MacArthur when, after defeating Japan on the islets of the Pacific and after ruling that nation like a true viceroy, he proved incapable of understanding the cold war. It is now happening with Montaner who, after fighting tenaciously during the cold war, lives, like all of us, in a world that, in some ways, resembles that one, but which is decisively different. Perhaps, at such historical junctures, the old soldiers necessarily have not to die but to fade away. maybe. In any case, that is precisely the situation.

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